


Al Coda

by CountessMillarca



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU Modern Setting, F/M, Harry plays the guitar because...I think he would be good at it, I Don't Even Know, I wanted to write something on how impersonal human interaction has become, Non-Magical, Other, and how hard it is to connect with people we see every day, and how we're afraid to reach out for fear of...what?, strangers in a coffee shop, there's a non-graphic attack, these tags are...hard to write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 17:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4674581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountessMillarca/pseuds/CountessMillarca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are here for that coffee-cream-bitterness and the low rasp of his voice. He is here because they are and because the strings of his guitar are unbroken. It’s enough to make them strangers but not enough to make them <em>perfect</em> strangers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Al Coda

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. All rights belong to J. K. Rowling.
> 
> I recently read an amazing Harry/Pansy fic, and I kinda got inspired...and so here we are.

The rain falls and the bluesy notes of a guitar fill the emptiness. His fingers are cold and curled over the strings. He strokes them gently, as if they’ll break, but the truth is that his skin will break before the strings. Mist gathers on the thin glass of the window and obscures everything that isn’t sound. The taste of coffee is bittercream on his tongue. There are only five customers in the coffee shop at this late hour. It is dark and quiet and no one cares for what comes out of his throat so long as he keeps singing. They are here for that coffee-cream-bitterness and the low rasp of his voice. He is here because they are and because the strings of his guitar are unbroken.

Harry rarely speaks to them, nor they to him, but he knows them. The old couple who come every Sunday and smile crooked smiles palliated with a mixture of mirth and cynicism as if they have seen too much and know secrets no one else does. The writer whose eyes shine between a mass of thick curls and never stray from the words she writes unless to frown or hum or laugh at them. The bespectacled student who carries too many books and can never finish them in one sitting but always comes back with more. The woman with hair the color of ripe corn who sits alone and does nothing but close her eyes and listen to his voice and murmur to her imaginations until she has no more coffee to drink and no excuse to linger. Harry knows them as much as they know him.

It’s enough to make them strangers but not enough to make them _perfect_ strangers.

His eyes flit to the only person who isn’t a stranger for one brief glance. Pansy is… _other_. He sees it in the way she gazes at him when he meets her eyes, the way she licks her lips when he intones certain words, that flutter of thick lashes, that cat-curling of red tongue. Harry can never define what _other_ is—only what it can’t be.

The last song for the night ends with one drawn-out syllable that dissolves into breath over the microphone. His lips slant in a half-smile when soft clapping spills in the silence that follows. Harry murmurs a hoarse _thank you_ then puts his guitar down in its case. His body unfurls as he stands, languorous stretch of neck and muscle and the grunt of a sigh. He walks to the counter where the owner of the retro café languishes on one elbow, a cigarette wisping smoke at the corner of her mouth.

“Nice, Harry. That a new song?” Pansy grins a red-lipped grin and pours him a glass of water.

Harry reaches inside his pocket for his tobacco and rolls himself a cigarette. He leans closer when she offers him her light, takes a slow drag, and laughs with the first spiral of smoke. “Yeah. You noticed?”

Pansy laughs with him, laughs at him. “'Course I did. How long do you think I’ve listened to you singing the same songs over and over again?”

A grin splits the seam of his mouth. “Too long?” Light teasing, light flirting. They’ve been there since the beginning but can’t get past that point. Harry’s lover is the guitar, and Pansy isn’t a woman to settle for second place.

“You said it.” She shakes her head and puts out her cigarette. Her grin unravels on a sigh, and Harry knows what she’s about to say. “You oughtta get a record deal one of these days. You’re too good to be wasted in a small coffee shop.”

A mere shrugging of shoulders is all he gives her. “It’ll come when it comes.” The same answer that never fails to sour her mien and contort her features into something less beautiful. But _she’s always beautiful_.

Pansy parts her red, red lips, probably for a snippy retort, but the writer’s voice echoes husky and shivery. “Excuse me, Pansy? Can I have the check please?”

Pansy nods and hurries to bring her check—but not before she casts down a stare that implies this isn’t over. A nimbus of smoke slithers out of Harry’s lips, and he chuckles under his breath. He listens at their exchange quietly as he smokes. All he can think is that the writer has the _right_ kind of voice for dark love songs, the kind that rouses shivers and raw sensation. It’s gripping and hauntingly whispery and a damn good voice for a female artist. Too bad she’s swallowed by words, though maybe it’s for the best. It doesn’t matter what _he_ thinks, but what _she_ wants, and that’s the way it should be.

The urge to write _that_ kind of song is visceral, coiling hotly around his nerves. Harry is crushing his cigarette and seeking the feel of his guitar while the fire still seethes hot and sizzles down his nerve endings. One strum, and another, strings edged and cutting deep but not deep enough. His eyes are closed and love burns like blood-fire on the thin layer of skin over his fingertips. Maybe it’s the wet-quiet-dark echoes of rain, or maybe that he can’t love Pansy any other way but this—Harry doesn’t know what it is. He only knows that what will break will never be the strings.

When he opens his eyes, Pansy is behind the counter again. She is staring at him, staring through him. Those red- _red_ -lips are curved, one loose tilt of carmine, not really a smile. Whatever she meant to say before is forgotten, and Harry knows what hides behind that not-smile will go unspoken. His hold tightens, fingers constricting around the guitar’s neck, suffocating the love-song, until the fire dies into embers, simmering slowly, painstakingly. A scream pierces his ears, and for a moment, Harry believes it’s the swan song of his guitar as she sacrifices herself to set him free—but it isn’t.

 _That writer—it’s her…_ but he’s never heard that kind of voice creep out of her throat.

Chill inundates the coffee shop, motion and stillness meshing and clashing across the spectrum of dread. The old man is wrapping his arms around his partner’s shoulders and whispering hollow reassurances. The lone blonde woman is frozen in her seat with an expression of absent-minded horror. The bespectacled student is springing up on his feet and wielding a thick tome on _The Principles of Economics_ as both shield and weapon. Pansy’s lips are bloodless and she’s yelling at him as she reaches for the phone. The last thing Harry hears before he rushes outside with the student at his heels, guitar still clutched inside his fist, is Pansy shouting _nine-nine-nine_ in the earpiece.

The rain falls and he is nothing but wet skin and a string of tension on the verge of being broken. His pulse is pounding in his ears and the muscles of his thighs are blazing.

Harry tracks the muffled remnants of that scream in the nearest back alley. The writer is on her hands and knees, writhing shadow of a woman and damp chestnut curls, struggling and consumed under the bulk of what appears to be a man. Adrenaline merges with fury and pours in swollen veins, iron melted into instinct and pure edge. He is charging forward, muscles bulging, arms rising. Harry is swinging his guitar at the man’s skull with both hands and more force than he’s ever thought himself capable of possessing. The man is falling on his back with groaning curses, and the student advances on him, bearing his book down on the man’s face, chest, stomach, groin, legs.

His guitar is cracked. Strings are broken. Splinters are embedded in Harry’s flesh. He feels nothing beyond the recoil vibrating in his bones. No crack, no break, no pain.

The writer whimpers and crawls away until she is gripping Harry’s pants. Sibilant _thank you_ fall off her lips, disjointed and diluted with shock. She’s trembling and can’t stand on her own, but Harry can’t help her more than he already has. The soft parts of his palms are shredded and slick with blood, still clutching his guitar. It’s strange, weightless…broken. _Broken_. It’s not his guitar. No…his guitar—

 _I—broke her_. Why _?_ _Why did_ I _break her?_ Arms circle his waist tightly. Harry stares down at the woman who’s holding him rooted to the ground. Her eyes are rimmed with red and he doesn’t like it—Harry only likes _red_ on Pansy’s lips—but then she speaks one more _thank you_ in the kind of voice he knows. Perhaps it _is_ her voice, that sultry tone stitched in her vocal cords, that heat seeping inside his skin to spill from the pads of his fingers onto the strings. And perhaps the fact that they’ve never _truly_ been strangers.

The student is the one who helps the writer to her feet. The boy is breathing hard, a mop of rust-red hair sticking to his scalp and freckles tattooed on the stretch of skin beneath his lower lashes like henna, and though his smile is kind, his eyes are filled with the unkindness of vengeance exacted. Harry knows he is no boy then, no matter what his age shows, and no stranger either.

Silence suffuses the rain and awareness suffuses the silence. The man is twitching on the ground, his face a mask of jagged lacerations, most raw and bleeding but some old and scarred, the corners of his mouth peeled back and baring yellow rot and unnaturally sharp canines. Harry is half-watching him fall in and out of consciousness, half-feeling the silence. His head turns, and he sees the writer engulfed in a circle of arms and concern at the entrance of the coffee shop—the old couple, the lone woman, the bespectacled student. But not Pansy. Just thinking of her puts weight on his arm, and _he_ _is too aware_. The crack, the break, the pain.

Sirens blare in the distance and someone is calling for him.

“Harry…” His name slips inside his senses and unbreaks what has been broken. There’s an intimate inflection and filaments of worry in the sound. A scintilla gleams red and heart-shaped, red on soft flesh, red on full lips. Pansy is by his side, silk-black hair soaked and clinging to the angles of her face, copper-blue eyes wild and slender fingers around his wrist. _How long has she—_

“Oh my god…your hands—Harry!” Pansy is pressing her lips on the back of his hand. And Harry lets go—lets go of the damned, broken thing that is no longer his guitar.


End file.
